Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dolemite is My Name’ on Netflix, Eddie Murphy’s Rousing Return to Form

After a brief theatrical release, Netflix brings the hotly anticipated Eddie Murphy vehicle Dolemite is My Name to its streaming platform. It’s hyped as a return-to-form for the comedy hero, whose movie output has been irregular at best in the 13 years since his Oscar-nominated performance in Dreamgirls. The role is an over-the-plate bullseye touchdown pass for Murphy: Rudy Ray Moore, the irrepressible entertainer who defied the odds and became a blaxploitation star. His raunchy, brilliantly inept 1975 midnight-movie smash Dolemite is a trash-cinema classic, and rightly so — but does the movie about the movie do right by Rudy’s legacy?

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rudy Ray Moore (Murphy) is 43 years old, and he’s still pestering radio-station DJs to play his single. Still telling corny jokes while emceeing other people’s shows. Still dreaming big while working the counter at the record store. It’s the early 1970s. It’s Los Angeles. Anything goes, and Rudy has yet to find his anything. To say stardom is elusive is an understatement.

Inspired by a rhyming hobo — 100 percent true! — Rudy concocts a bigger-than-life character: He dons an afro wig, slides into a clowny pimp suit and bellows, “Dolemite is my name, and —-ing up mother—-ers is my game!” He stands on stage and recites dirty rhymes to a rhythm-and-blues beat (something everyone a decade later would call “rap”) — rhymes so dirty, they’d give his heroes Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx the vapors. He quickly learns his schtick has no business courting the mainstream, so he shakes down his auntie for some cash — “What happened to all that money you made when you fell off that bus?” — and makes bootleg recordings, wrapping them in brown paper and hawking them under the record-store counter or out of his car trunk. Soon, he’s touring the Chitlin Circuit, and one of his LPs, Eat Out More Often, somehow cracks the Billboard chart.

So Dolemite is finally earning Rudy a solid living, but as these things go, he wants more. One Christmas, he treats his buddies — Ben (Craig Robinson), Jimmy (Mike Epps) and Toney (Tituss Burgess) — to a movie, The Front Page, starring Jack Lemmon. It has nothing for them: “No titties, no funny, no kung fu,” Rudy laments. THEY’LL make a goddamn movie, a good one, about Dolemite, they vow. Rudy recruits a scholarly playwright, Jerry Jones (Keegan-Michael Key), to pen a script, and a Hollywood bit player, D’Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes), to co-star and direct. They move into an abandoned, junkie-ridden hotel and convert it into a movie set. They hire some UCLA film students, because someone on the set needs to know what they’re doing. And Rudy bets every penny of his record-sales royalties and rights, and then some, on the movie. What happens next is movie history, mother—-er!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Two great movies about the genesis of so-bad-they’re-great movies immediately come to mind: Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist. Time for a triple-feature!

Performance Worth Watching: Confirming assumptions and meeting expectations, Eddie Murphy owns the role. He’s got verve and panache. Snipes, as a flamboyant cokehead, and Key, amusingly buttoned-up, come tantalizingly close to stealing a scene or three from him, and when all three converge for an exchange, it’s a rich comedic display.

Memorable Dialogue: “Hey man, I’ll put on a girdle. What I gotta do?” — Rudy’s reply to a movie producer who says he’s too “doughy” to be a leading man

Sex and Skin: Tons of it! Keep your eyes open for whoever got a plum gig as Murphy’s stunt butt.

Our Take: If Dolemite is My Name seems slight at first blush, think again. Murphy is terrific of course, as vivid and inspired as ever. He affects his performance with the vulgar patois of the 8-track era’s rich cultural stew, and greatly enriches the film’s conventional biopic structure. Who needs fancy direction when you’ve got Eddie Murphy on his A-game? You just point the camera at him and go. Axel Foley and the Klumps and Mr. Robinson and Gumby and James Brown in the hot tub and Velvet Jones and James Early and Donkey and Chandler Jarrell (what? You got something against The Golden Child?) and Reggie Hammond and Billy Ray Valentine all kind of come to a head with Rudy Ray Moore. You’ll want to see it; you’ll have to see it.

Murphy’s wildly entertaining, as you’d expect, but neither is he off the buffet and knife-and-forking the scenery — that’s Dolemite’s job. His characterization is subtly poignant. Rudy briefly references his miserable childhood in Arkansas, when his sharecropper father used to frequently beat him, but the movie doesn’t indulge a heartbreaking flashback. Instead, it drops in a scene where D’Urville tells Rudy to “use it,” to channel his pain into his performance. Which is a big chewy wad of hysterical irony, considering his on-screen characterization of Dolemite boasts all the dynamic range of pinewood.

And this is where Rudy becomes an inspirational figure, because he overcomes his limitations — he’s chubbier than Hollywood stars, he can’t act, he has no money — with raw gumption. Whether it’s true to the real Rudy is beside the point; Dolemite is My Name illustrates how one African-American overcame the social constraints of the time, and connected with an audience starving to see people like themselves on the big screen, real and raw and funny and kicking ass. The movie foregoes any blatant socio-political overtures, keeping the tone light and burning its commentary into the subtext, and is all the better for it. Because ultimately, Rudy’s a hopeful guy, not one to dwell on past hardship. And beneath his blustery, swingin’-dick Dolemite persona, Rudy’s not in it for the women and the fame and the money. He’s earnest. He wants to entertain. He wants to make people happy. He’s a sweetheart. He just wants to be loved. And he deserves it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Shut up and fire it up. Dolemite is My Name is a rousing crowd-pleaser.

Your Call:

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Dolemite is My Name on Netflix